Talk:West End, Boston

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Untitled[edit]

The African Meeting House and Smith School are both on Beacon Hill; Smith Court is just off Joy Street. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.19.117.63 (talk) 08:54, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just added some citations to the page. All sources can be found either at Boston's Central library or at the West End museum. There are still many things that could use fact-checking or citations. Sbacle 15:55, 17 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Citation of Citysquares.com is a mistake. The site has no page for the West End and is merely a commercial portal.

Several other citations would be far more useful, including these --

Juris A. Grauds, Urban Renewal in New Haven and Boston (Current Issues in Cities and Suburbs, Northeastern University, November 23, 2005, http://www.curp.neu.edu/pdfs/Grauds_Urban_Renewal_Boston_NewHaven.pdf). This publicly available article provides aerial photos showing the West End just before and just after demolition in the late 1950s.

Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (1962, Free Press). Nathan P. Glazer, review, "West End Story" (N.Y. Review of Books 1:1, 1963, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13760). The publicly available review describes the first major exploration of the social dimensions of the West End Project, by a now notable sociologist who lived in the West End before its demolition.

Thomas H. O'Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950-1970 (1993, Northeastern University Press). J. Charles Swift, review, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=10875851783912 (1995). This is a totally unapologetic history of the West End project from the view of real estate developers.

Monica Collins, Born Again (Boston Globe, August 7, 2005, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/08/07/born_again/). This represents a "mea culpa" from the Globe, 50 years overdue. It makes no direct mention of the Globe's shilling for the West End Project in the 1950s and 1960s, including a 1965 hagiography of its latter-day saint, Ed Logue, in the Sunday magazine.

E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing (2003, St. Augustine's Press). A diatribe accusing Philadelphia, Boston and other real estate developers in the 1930s through the 1950s of harboring racial prejudice. We are indeed shocked.

Sean M. Fisher and Carolyn Hughes, Editors, The Last Tenement: Confronting Community and Urban Renewal in Boston's West End (1992, Bostonian Society). Another late-arriving package mixing useful information and false sentiment.

Thank you for this information it seems you know quite a bit about the area youo should hop on board and make this a good article. I will take your information and work on a rebuild. Thanks again. Markco1 04:07, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Made a stab at a rebuild hope it lives up to it's history Markco1 22:06, 9 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Improving the page[edit]

I just added a more info. There are a few things I think would really add to the page.

Historical photos of the west end before renewal,
map of the street layout before renewal,
Statistical info on the current demographics of the west end: who lives there, what types of businesses are there, etc.
Important people from the west end: I've already added info about Lomasney. Leonard Nimoy is from the West end but I don't have a good citation for it. Anyone else?

I was unable to find pictures specifically of the old West End on Wiki. There are some maps of the street layout of all of old Boston, but nothing specific to the West End. I think it would be great to have some before and after pictures of the neighborhood as a whole. There are some great ones in the books listed as sources (almost all of which can be found at the Boston Public Library). I'm sure there are at least some good ones with expired copyrights. Nayone with a scanner want to give it a go?Sbacle 22:15, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Photo Attribution[edit]

Recently, the "Boston's West End as of 2009 (photo by Satoru Murata)" description was changed because photo attributions are to appear on the photo page itself, but I don't see that information on a photo page. How can that attribution data (to a living photographer of note) be added to the proper location in Wikipedia? MaynardClark (talk) 20:09, 19 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know how someone found that the photo is by "Satoru Murata" because it's not stated on the original Flickr page. It seems to be unverifiable, and therefore not important to state anywhere on Wikipedia. Although I could edit the image description page File:2009 WestEnd Boston 3495477357.jpg to include that author name.--ɱ (talk) 20:35, 19 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Notable residents[edit]

@Sbacle suggested adding a "Notable residents" section. I'd like to second that. Here are a few people to start with. (SNIPPED)

I'll just leave this info here in case someone wants to add a section with some or all of these people. Some of them may have lived in what is now considered part of Beacon Hill, since there's some overlap. The African Meeting House, for example, is mentioned in this article, but in the article about it, there's no mention of the West End. The author of this book mentions that a lot of black Bostonians moved from the North End to "the West End on the north side of Beacon Hill". He then lists some people who lived on Belknap Street (now Joy St., the same street as the African Meeting House), including Samuel Snowden, whose WP bio says he lived in Beacon Hill. Thomas Paul lived on George Street, which is included in both the 1769 West End map and the 1842 map of Beacon Hill. Whatever. Rosekelleher (talk) 20:57, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Since no one has responded I'll take that as a go-ahead. Rosekelleher (talk) 13:55, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Was/Is[edit]

Some recent edits suggest there's some confusion about the status of the West End. It still exists but in a different form, right? So should the lead paragraph say it "was" or "is" a neighborhood? --MopTop (talk) 06:57, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Regarding the second-to-last photo: West_End_and_Charles_MGH_station_from_Prudential_Tower,_April_2009.jpg[edit]

I am split on whether to remove this image. On one hand, this is a great photo with a strong overhead view of the city. On the other, when looking at the attribution, I confirmed this is a photo of a model Boston (the macro style betrays this as well). Would this fall outside the scope of depicting the West End? Snaans (talk) 17:57, 16 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at Miniature faking, this is what the photographer did. They even have several albums dedicated to their use of a tilt shift lens to achieve that effect. Despite that this image actually -does- depict the West End, it's such a distracting photography gimmick on par with b&w or HDR that I think it warrants removal.

ɱ

(talk) 03:44, 17 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]